“We are urging Iraqi and coalition forces never to use white phosphorus in the vicinity of civilians. Even if civilians are not present at the time of its use, due to the residual risks they should not use airburst white phosphorus munitions unless it is absolutely necessary to achieve military objectives which cannot be accomplished through safer means,” Rovera said.

Examining photographs taken by a New York Times photographer on October 20 and then interviewing him, Amnesty could not definitively conclude which forces used the white phosphorus munitions.

“It is not clear whether the projectiles were fired by Iraqi central government forces, Peshmerga forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), or forces belonging to members of the US-led coalition,” Amnesty said.

But the NGO did conclude based on the photographic evidence that the explosion dispersal pattern “appears consistent with the US-made 155-mm M825A1 projectile, which ejects 116 felt wedges containing white phosphorus over an area between 125 – 250 meters wide.”

So, hey, US Coalition: don’t use this evil stuff unless it’s absolutely necessary. So sayeth the compromised human rights NGO as it was in R2P Libya, saving the women and girls in Afghanistan. Fifteen years!!! Are they safe yet?

There are good bombings and bad bombings, depending on who the US and Nato support for their own purposes. War on (ISIS) Mosul: good; war on (ISIS) Aleppo: bad’, war on Gadaffi/Libya, good’, etc. john pilger

84 responses to “Like sand through the hourglass…these are the Tweets of our lives…”

“only turkeys have left wings.” yes, rush…slimeball? limeburger? is still w/us. i think justin bieber is playing at his next wedding. the bride shoveling cake down his snack hole can only be viewed on jumbo-tron.

“we are so excited to be back on the HR council!!!” yeah, it’s like the jedis: no one ever does anything w/out checking in w/the council. windy windbag ex post facto pontifications about freedom haters are quite the afro-disiac. i shudder to imagine what Power does after her…eructations on the Council.

don’t use the banned weapons unless you really, really feel like you really, really need to! i bet the Kurds are all like, “it’s hairy down here. send up the bright, burny, smelly, melty thing!” and the murkins are all like, “ok, boss.” yeah, i bet that’s how it goes.

this is the zeitgeist; i suppose it had to come to this in a way. i tagged it in part as satire…cuz it is. there ya are w/ bieber again, lol.

i spent about an hour (wasted it) this a.m. trying to find AFP’s list of ‘the 80 NGOs that lobbied to get russia off the unhrc, but they never provide it past the few named. wouldn’t that be interesting to know if there is a letter, and if so, who signed it? i even looked at the unhrc website, and guess what? rwanda was elected! (see ann garrison’s BAR tweet above.) holy hell. when down is up, war is peace, and we’ve plunged headfirst into the looking glass. ha: the tmes of israel carried the afp story.

Prohibited under weapons convention
“Though it can also be used to light up enemy positions, the munitions are also effective when used to firebomb opposing forces.
While the use of the material is not specifically banned, it is covered by Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons, which prohibits use of the substance as an incendiary weapon against civilian populations and in air attacks against military forces in civilian areas.
Though the UK and 80 other countries are signatories to protocol III, the United States is not.”

the mail says that the russians used it in chechnya in 1994.

will we ever be free of weiner’s dick and clinton’s sex addictions? guess huma abedin is one of the most incendiary email writers in that cache, so mebbe not in my lifetime.

the bieb annoys me, like lots of pop culture. rushbaugh had elton john play at one of his weddings. my very, idiotically conservative boss at the time suggested maybe elton likes rush’s politics? uh maybe he likes rush’s money is more like it.

i’ve had several people tell me, incl. someone who claimed to know Ann Coulter personally, that it’s all an act for these two. oh no! now i believe in nothing. i had the misfortune of watching Coulter on the odious Bill Maher show. she ran circles around him. it was fun to see another look cross his face, dismay, beside his usual smugness, as she threw the Bern’s & Hil’s own words back at Bill on the broad areas of agreement b/n them & the guy who pores over Hitler speeches for his bedtime reading.

Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.

HA HA HA HA HA. The daily press should only be used for only minor aggressions!

When crapitalists run out of good stories, they go to war. Of course the press is bent to that agenda.

If Obama said he was wary of the Deep State bullet, what the hell is going on with Trump? Surely it’s an act. The warmongers pretend he’s alike Hitler and he pretends he’s a demagogue.

And surely his election would taken as an opportunity for new punishments for proles.

shit man, i’m so bummed. i thought his wall & punishing, what is it? china, for their, like, currency manipulation (is that a thing?) and…DVD stealing? anyway, bringin’ blockbuster jobs back to America!

notice what a bunch of whiny little spoiled brats we are all the time? oh boo hoo, china is cheating b/c of their currency & b/c they are too lazy to do their own “Friends” episodes! any time anyone gets even a tiny economic advantage it’s b/c they somehow are “cheating.” i tho’t these were manly tough guy john bunyan galt’s gulch “make train go fast now” capitalist winners here!

oops, wrong bunyan. i meant that flannel wearing dude from fargo. but yeah, bigger wimps than that pilgrim feller too.

Yeah, so are you implying that proles will be punished not just for their debt-grubbing (through austerity) but for their inability to live up to Trump-Galt (they have to be fired everyday for not making Amurka great again?)

If Trump-Galt were to be elected, what are the “Deep State” contingency plans (or is it more an option?) Do they just let Papa Doc Trump play out his fantasies and discard the pretense of technocratic welfare?

parse the difference between registering for selective service and re-instituting the draft. but it seems that it the thinking is that now women can be in combat roles, they should have to register, as well. a brand of feminism, i guess. i haven’t been able to find out when or if the bills will go into conference, but i gave up at gov track cuz they kept sending me to the house version of the 2017 ndaa. but this was fun stuff, and of course ted cruz is adamantly opposed. the house had voted down the ‘women amendment‘; it was pretty convoluted a story:

““Conservative groups, which threatened to target senators who voted for the policy bill, reacted with anger on Tuesday to the bill’s passage. “Allowing our daughters to be forced into combat if there is a draft is a clear example of Washington placing more value on liberal social engineering than military objectives and preparedness,” one such group, Heritage Action for America, said in a news release.”

but yeah, an all-volunteer army was a brilliant move; a defacto jobs program w/ signing bonuses. is that program timing out, one wonders?

that there aren’t too many jewish bankers involved in the AIIB? really, after scanning it, i tried this a.m. to find pepe escobar’s far simpler take on the eurasian realignment not that duterte has given the bird to the west, and pivoted east, much like O has done. but i can’t find it, and i’d thought i’d mentioned that it was at CP. if so, it’s out of sequential order at their site. weirdly, some are calling him ‘heroic’, but that’s hard to swallow unless the propoganda against him has all been lies.

but sure banks can be evil, including central banks, and most esp. the IMF, world bank, which is the underlying reason for the AIIB and the BRICS bank: low interest rates, no built in austerity for failure to pay on time…maybe those will even turn out to be so.

though he’s not close to those in power, Trump is very appealing to those who aspire to reach it, particularly the set of “deep state” representatives that could be described as ‘pragmatists’. Not many of them have spoken up throughout the years because of the fear that they have of being professionally purged by their ruling neo-conservative peers, but it can be gathered that they’re a sizeable silent majority that’s ready to partially co-opt relevant influential “deep state” institutions on behalf of Trump in the event that he gets elected President and symbolically appoints ‘their people’ as institutional chiefs.

doesn’t that contradict your objection to my having said that the intel services are in thrall to clinton? she is not ‘passive’, although i suppose one might say that in way obama was leaving so many of dubya’s folks in place. we were told “just to soothe world during transition”; what a con man. i think that the deep state depended on his malleability (weak willed, wanting notice and power).

will we ever see about the orangutan hair man? hard to imagine. even if so, could the deep state provide him the levers of power he’d need to wield? is my imagination simply failing me?

Either they’ve left the selection of Drumpf up to proles or he has connections (you could argue that he’s been approved as a “passive” – a front con man ). The former is very difficult to believe. The isolationists have been betrayed many times by pwesidents but they have been catered to – for a time. The betrayals are to some extent contingent on world events.

The article illustrates that he’d need to negotiate his policy reformation. Wouldn’t he be good at this, con man to con men? And then there’s the angle that Drumpf would con Amurkans into greater depravities that suit “Intelligent agents” just fine.

with that explanation, you may be right, or the author might be. does he say which deep state organs he sees as silent for now? as far as further depravities, the little i know of him is from headlines, and from them one would conclude he has no principled moral core. now as to whether or not some deep state bodies helped to *construct* his as the *tension* (either you or someone else had called it) that would drive voters into the queen’s camp is a possibility, but a plan that may have gone awry.

otoh, i’ve seen quite a few comments in which ‘i’m voting for T-rump’ either as the lesser evil or as a protest vote against a massively corrupt system.
whoa, nellie. i just couldn’t mark that box, but i admit that i’d be half-glad if he wins, even if he is another puppet prez. can’t it all be over?

Can’t it all be over? It’s like voting for the weather which is only going to get worse. At least your conscience is clear if yours didn’t get selected.

HA HA HA.

I read recently that these geostrategic schemers have gone behind the veil; Iraq showed the PNAC broadcast strategy lead to opprobrium when their machinations cost too much. For that among other reasons the counter-PNAC’s are not announcing themselves.

Ya know, some of these filthy rich bastards essentially believe in slavery. When they bring America home, it ain’t gonna be pretty. FDR desperately went for the world management of crapitalism to escape the isolationists steel trap. The consequent crapitalist globalization has just made masters more and multiculturally ruthless.

Recently a cache of 2,337 e-mails from the office of a high-ranking advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin was dumped on the Internet after purportedly being obtained by a Ukrainian hacking group calling itself CyberHunta. The cache shows that the Putin government communicated with separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine, receiving lists of casualties and expense reports while even apparently approving government members of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. And if one particular document is to be believed, the Putin government was formulating plans to destabilize the Ukrainian government as early as next month in order to force an end to the standoff over the region, known as Donbass.
[…]
Based on reporting by the Associated Press’s Howard Amos and analysis by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, at least some of the e-mails—dumped in a 1-gigabyte Outlook .PST mailbox file—are genuine.
[…]
The timing of the release of the documents may suggest that the “Ukrainian hacker group” may in fact have acted with the aid or at the direction of the CIA. That could be part of the “secret” cyber-response reportedly being developed in response to purported Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the e-mails of the Clinton presidential campaign chair John Podesta, of state election officials’ systems, and of other political organizations. The hack may also be part of an influence campaign in support of the Ukrainian government, though it’s unlikely Ukraine’s own intelligence organization was involved.

I just had the thought that the internet may be becoming a ‘driverless car’ prototype – all being crafted around or beyond that infamous ‘year two thousand’. And just as high speed trading on Wall Street probably will crash that system irretrievably some day (says she who knows nothing about stock transactions), not to mention the vision of a megacrash of driverless cars on a wintry highway some future Thanksgiving weekend (and we thought the danger was those Mexican truckers having full access hither and yon, or what about those nuclear waste trucks?) – oh dear, a carryon sentence that is looking for a conclusion – ah, SO indeed shall all internet revelations make redundant the freedom of information requests, presidential libraries revealing important secrets many years from my demise, and probably crash the system well before said demise. . . We’ll just have to put on our specs and read, read, read whilst we’ve still got it – or have some other diligent folks do the reading for us if only we just wait a bit for the dust to settle.

Assange’s goal was to debilitate crypto-plotters. Already NSA et al were likewise trying to debilitate everyone else. Was it a joke that the Kremlin had resorted to typewriters?

I’m sure Madison Avenue is crafting PR for leakage. But certainly the Atlantic Council is so crafting.

In addition to the expansion of NATO throughout Europe and even deeper into former Soviet space (with concomitant political, foreign policy, economic and legal transformations) and the deployment of a missile shield along Russia’s western border, the Atlantic Council is playing a major role in the ongoing energy war with Russia over supplies of natural gas and oil to Europe.

Internet revelations will be surpassed by internet pollution and the worst polluters won’t be prole trolls.

there are twitterbots whose function is to manufacture favorable PR & keep clicking the “like” button on FB stuff, et al. there are plenty of paid trolls around. Google is part of the “deep state.” (w.d. put up a link to an awesome chapter from Assange on what the gooey goog’s CEO & so forth are up to.) though the furore over Trump’s “i wanna grab your p—-” leak has abated, or rather been replaced w/neo-Mcarthyism, that leak was clearly carefully timed to try to deliver a scalping to Big Hair’s campaign. the purpose of the leak was to deflect attention from the awfulness of HRC as revealed by Wikileaks. sorry to say, except for Fuchs news, the MSM took the bait & focused entirely on his foul locker room shock jock talk.

oh, my. again i’m so far behind. i’m curious about both katehon essays, and rax: where did this originate? i gotta say i love the hell outta the clip: ‘… cache of 2,337 e-mails from the office of a high-ranking advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin…”

oh, i never did find the “AFP: 80 NGO’s want russia off’ list or letter, not even at agent france-presse. but boy, they seem like an alt version of the wapo. couldn’t tell from wiki who owns it, although they likely wrote it in any event, no?

As a result of fundamental changes in the Ukrainian political situation, it is possible to achieve the return of the Donbass to Ukraine on Russian terms…The achievement of set goals provides as soon as possible provides measures for the political destabilization of Ukraine. The consequence [would be] early parliamentary and presidential elections. The most favorable period for…the set of measures is in November 2016 to March of 2017.

That one looks harmless to me, Comrade Rax. Putin has been openly requesting that those two ‘rebel’ areas be granted status within Ukraine in a similar fashion to the federated states within Russia. “Russian terms” would simply imply this, not that the areas be incorporated into Russia, which Putin has been reluctant to do all along.

He’d far rather have Ukraine remain intact as a country – more protection for Russia than making an attempt to incorporate the region when they have their hands full absorbing Crimea. He really, really is not thinking about empire but rather about rebuilding Russia’s shattered economy. The ultimate goal of political destabilization for the current regime sounds nasty until you realize how nasty the regime is. It’s a far better proposition to have the destabilization occur by means of a legitimate portion of Ukraine as a whole during the harsh realities of winter in peaceful elections than it would be either to foment an uprising (they’ve had enough bombing and shelling) or to invade, which the west apparently really wanted to have happen.

I guess it is all in how you read ‘measures’. More carrot than stick would be my hope.

Sorry, I’m not seeing the equivalence. For Putin it would be not intramural but a relationship between countries – maybe US and Cuba? Rapprochment is the word I was thinking of, though I know you like to think in more exciting terms than that. I’m just so very tired of conflict pushing people out of their homes.

Incidentally, I did find “Legacy of Ashes” at my good little library, wendye. Talk about a tome; that’s one. But apropos the conversation, very early on the CIA’s almost first debacle was to hire on a very shady German friendly Ukranian to ‘help’ infiltrate the USSR. A number of agents parachuted in, and were one by one eliminated or gulaged. A bit later they also tried Syria, got their man in charge but it didn’t last long.

Weiner (not the current one) had a different take on the Bay of Pigs than my previous reading, less pro-Kennedy though he did say the CIA lied about what they were doing from the getgo.

i agree w/ juliania that putin has long wanted to see ukraine federalized, and do wonder what ‘forcing early elections’ might mean, or at least that’s how the kyiv post has it: “…correspondence about ways to force early presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine.”

sean gallagher’s speculation about the cia seems about right, but he adds this at the end:

“Regardless of their provenance, the documents would be a natural fit for Wikileaks since this raw dump of e-mails with attachments looks similar to the Podesta e-mails. Wikileaks previously published e-mails from Syrian political figures—a collection of over two million e-mails dated from 2006 to 2012. However, the Daily Dot’s Dell Cameron and Patrick Howell O’Neill reported that those e-mails (obtained originally by Syrian anti-government “hactivists”) were published minus a set of e-mails detailing the movement of billions of dollars from Syria’s central bank to a Russian bank. Wikileaks denied suppressing the documents.” (the hack was via revoluSec?). the dailydot says this was wikileaks’ response:

“(At the request of a source familiar with RevoluSec members, the Daily Dot has decided not to publish the documents concerning RevoluSec’s activities at this time out of concern the hackers may be identified, captured, and possibly harmed in their home countries, which include Yemen and Syria.)

In response to a request for comment, WikiLeaks said the preceding account “is speculation and it is false.” The spokesperson continued: “The release includes many emails referencing Syrian-Russian relations. As a matter of long standing policy we do not comment on claimed sources. It is disappointing to see Daily Dot pushing the Hillary Clinton campaign’s neo-McCarthyist conspiracy theories about critical media.” (WikiLeaks threatened to retaliate against the reporters if they pursued the story: “Go right ahead,” they said, “but you can be sure we will return the favour one day.”) ”

it reminds me a bit of a hit job on wikileaks that mandos’s guest post at ianwelsh.net posted that included a huffpooh piece by zeynep tufecki :’WikiLeaks Put Women in Turkey in Danger, for No Reason (UPDATE). curious as all giddy-up, i searched and found boatloads of media has the same story, but every one them…cited tufecki. one commenter said that the update said it all in that ‘wikileaks only linked to the turkish database, never published it or held it at their site. reminded me of the woman running into the western press pool building in libya and telling the tale of condoms and rape weirdness stories the wold bought, but then…she evaporated, didn’t she?

ian welsh (cough) changed his mind on hitting ‘assange’ for that on his next post). commenter jill added this wikiTweet:

Remember that story going around last week about WikiLeaks and "Turkish women"? It was fabricated. https://t.co/0cOXb983az

for fun i went to nato; i love their account. i may remove some of these later if the thread gets too long, but for now:

‘Press conference by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg following the meeting of the North Atlantic Council at the level of NATO Defence Ministers’ (on Operation #forwarrdpresence, get it? Roosia’s revanchist aims)

‘NATO surveillance planes fly counter-ISIL missions; NATO steps up the fight against terrorism by deploying AWACS surveillance planes out of Turkey to help the counter-ISIL coalition by building a picture of the airspace over Syria.’

“#Ukraine is key to Euro-Atlantic security http://bit.ly/2e51s1w
Propaganda is not #NATO’s way of communicating. It’s all about facts and information.” here are the facts, not the roosian propaganda. dated, but still useful….

“to help the counter-ISIL coalition by building a picture of the airspace over Syria.” O. That’s a fact, huh? Is it more likely that the AWACS are used to coordinate air forces or study their opponents tactics? And next we will have AWACS “leaks” to counter the “Russian hacks”.

“Does Russia have the financial means for its military ambitions?” the best economy is the one most beneficial to the military, the one that most enables the widest range of killing & destruction. the language of “efficiency” & “competition” views economic activity thru the prism of military-style conquest. Thus the economy *must* generate another Cold War?

Yeah, they did a butt-load of fantasizing about fwee markets only to end up with command-and-control as their security. The Russians, among others, are asking whether Amurka has the financial means given that it’s finance is so rickety and it’s bonehead war-technologists are fat on gimmickry.

the nato figures are in direct contradiction to the several sources named in the wiki. in any event, the *public* figure (turse says the shadow budget is about double that) for the us military budget is from 7 to 8 times higher that russia’s. ironic nato tasks russia for wanting to upgrade all its hardware, but isn’t it true that russian weapon systems, ships, fighter jets, etc. are superior to the usian counterparts? and of course, to that extent, the russians are responding to the new cold war.

hype is part of warfare. our spears are better than your spears. still, you can find even top US brass drooling over some things Russians can do. Russia has the huge advantage of being essentially & in all aspects defensive. quite the other thing from the West. there have also been war gaming scenarios w/lesser enemies (iran) where the US gets its ass kicked b/c it’s so reliant on hi-tech gadgetry. (N.B.: use of nukes was out of bounds). plus, we may find out that our trillion dollar “defense” is, to an extent, a fraud. that all this expensive crap doesn’t actually work against a “real” enemy. (we know our bombs work, & napalm & DU and…no denying the amount of damage the US can do.) and we all know the jokes about cost-inflation in DOD contracting, that some part of the DOD budget is for stuff they could have gotten at 10% of the cost. it really is a gigantic scam. what’s that quinbillion dollar plane that can’t fly in the rain?

However, all this is moot b/c the end result is nuclear war. no one is going to remember thru their radioactive tears that the budgets were phony or that Russia had sunburst missiles that, supposedly, could take out a US carrier group (sic).

all military conflicts in our era contain w/in them apocalyptic nightmares.

is the f-35 stealth fighter the one you’re pinging? crap sensors, constant retro-fits? but the chinese version u s pilots drool over! thanks for your answer; a dozen times better that i could have done. but yes, i may be hearing b at MOA (and in the past, the saker), but popular mechanics also thinks so. gooooooooooaaaaaaallll! ;-)

jane’s defense weekly? too hard to google-bing. but the superior might of nato™ is one of the reasons i love to get on their twit account. yes, it’s perhaps depraved of me, but didn’t you likenme to ‘american psycho’? (just joshin’…)

plus and lol +++: ‘Process has begun’: FBI scouring 650k emails on Clinton aide husband’s laptop in reopened case, 30 Oct, 2016 (huma dudn’t know how they got on her account; wouldn’t ya hate to one of the ones looking at weiner’s weiner sexting for ones w/ a minor? will we never be free of them? http://on.rt.com/7tgm

it’s amazing that people believe that the people, leaders, who at every turn lie & obfuscate about slavery, the natives, Vietnam, Israel, El Salvador, etc., etc., etc., are somehow telling the truth about Iraq, Syria, etc., etc. why lie about the natives? why lie about genocide in the Philippines? b/c nothing has changed. oh, and that we are supposed to believe these same people & their boojwah historians about the “crimes of communism.”

(OT: and if Comey drives a stake thru the Vampire Harpy’s heart, more power to him.)

as if the pentagon isn’t a massive $%$&#( intervention into the economy. & all these “free-market” mouseketeers sucking at the DOD’s toxic teat.

and yes what you said. the market runs on lots of hype. “unemployment is at 5%.” sure it is. wouldn’t want to scare bond markets by telling the plebs the truth, would we? the market traders & such are all fantasists but they require the rest of us to be even more delusional.

Tufecki says: “these senseless violations of privacy that make people mistrust the free flow of information and instead support whatever governments say protects them.” That muddiness is part of the pollution I was referring to. It’s the internet analogue to Dumpf’s mudslinging. Or, it’s like turning the internet into the spy world’s hall of mirrors.

That “AKP hack” originated with “Phineas Fisher”:

I hacked AKP (the ruling party in Turkey) because I support the society people are trying to build in Rojava and Bakur [1], and they’re being attacked by Turkey [2][3][4]. I don’t see leaking as an end in itself, so I was talking with people in Rojava and Bakur to see how best to use the access I’d gotten. […] wikileaks decided to publish now anyway with the international attention from the recent coup attempt.

Then “[a] few hours after WikiLeaks announced the leak, the organization tweeted, “our infrastructure is under sustained attack.”

We are unsure of the true origin of the attack. The timing suggests a Turkish state power faction or its allies. We will prevail & publish.

Who are it’s allies? And if there wasn’t anything sensitive to them in the leak, why the immediate attack?

Still, from this brief review, it does appear Wikileaks was too eager to publish this information. And was Wikileaks aiding the coup plotters? This puzzle I must set aside.

As to the Syrian bank transfers:

The Daily Dot obtained U.S. court records from an unnamed source about hackers’ success in breaking into the Syrian government’s networks and obtaining emails about bank transactions. […] the outlet reported that some documents about bank transfers never made it to Wikileaks’ website: […] The correspondence, which WikiLeaks has denied withholding, describes “more than” €2 billion ($2.4 billion, at current exchange rates) moving from the Central Bank of Syria to Russia’s VTB Bank.

So, fucking US court records of some hack (probably US intelligence?) show Wikileaks missed something?

briefly: ‘didn’t report’ supports the ‘belief’ that wikileaks works for putin, as does bad hair man. dunno from ‘phineas fisher’ from revoluSec, but softpedia has the same quotes, plus:

“After WikiLeaks dumped the AKP data, Turkey banned access to WikiLeaks from within the country. Currently, accessing the WikiLeaks AKP data dump URL also triggers a warning from your browser, the site being marked as dangerous (it’s not).”

Are the Atlantic Council allies of the AKP party? Sure, the Muslim Brotherhood are exploited for “democracy promotion” but
Relations turned sour with the coup in Egypt and Turkey’s fear that links with the MB would lead to retaliation from both the new Egyptian government and the Gulf states (with the exception of Qatar). The once warm relationship between the AKP and the MB has measurably cooled as geopolitical realities have shifted, especially since the most recent presidential elections in Egypt.
Is Turkey weaning itself from a Gulenist Deep State?

shucks, i hadn’t even known that there was a recent presidential election in egypt. i’d thought you were going to speak of a cooling relationship between akp and the west post-coup attempt, but no. and your surmise about the cooling between akp and the m. brotherhood is not something i’d known; your more avid attention is great.

but as for the turkey and US/nato, they are terrified that turkey might seek other alliances to shift the balance even more than the developing multi-polar world. not so much as to extradite gullen though…or would they? ;-)

What would they get for trading in that top agent? On one hand they don’t hesitate to stab their minions in the back but in this case the benefit of trade doesn’t jump out at me … and diplomacy is not the US suit. if Erdogan has neo-Ottoman visions as the West collapses, the Clinkton response is more war. And can Amurka

the ‘give us gullen’ might just be theatre; i dunno. but though this is dated, pepe escobar reminded us:

“Ankara’s ambition, actually obsession, is to position Turkey as the major energy crossroads for the whole of the EU. 1) As a transit hub for gas from Iran, Central Asia and, up to now, Russia (the Turkish Stream gas pipeline is suspended, not cancelled). 2) As a hub for major gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean. 3) And as a hub for gas imported from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq.

Turkey plays the role of key energy crossroads in the Qatar pipeline project. But it’s always important to remember that Qatar’s pipeline does not need to go through Syria and Turkey. It could easily cross Saudi Arabia, the Red Sea, Egypt and reach the Eastern Mediterranean.”

geopolitics can have any number of variants, i guess. but poor syria, in the crossroads for regime change since choosing the islamic pipeline in 2010, signing an MOU w/ iran in 2012..

IF THIS IS SO, holy hell. some russophobes at ian welsh’s say it will blow assad-lovers at MOA minds: ‘Turkey-Russia sign landmark agreement on Syria; Russia and Turkey clinched a landmark agreement on a new map of Syria against the US-supported PYD terror corridor in northern border of war-torn Syria’, Yeni Şafak, oct. 31

wiki: Yeni Şafak (“New Dawn”) is a conservative Turkish daily newspaper. The newspaper is known for its hardline support of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP.[2] It, together with other media organizations in Turkey, has been accused of using hate speech to target minorities and opposition groups.
Yeni Şafak made international headlines when it was discovered that the newspaper had fabricated an interview with Noam Chomsky.”

i only watched the opening scene/1st murder so far. “shakespeare removers” is the name on the moving van (removers in that fake English they speak in England) at the opening. i know he did tons of campy crap, but i think V.P. is sehr magnifique. and where are the “B” movies now? oh, right. they are mostly all “B” movies…w/big CGI/FX budgets.

zo…most of the species decline was far earlier than *now*, and “Overfishing is the most common threat, and while some fisheries are now showing recovery because of stronger management measures, the majority of the fish stocks that contribute most to global fish catch are now either fully fished or overfished.”

blame it on subsistence fishing by the poor? well, if it’s aboriginals of whih they speak, yes, it has happened. but when it was possible in the past to search the invitations to davos (no longer by nation, just by alphabet), the two compromised eco groups who were there were WWF and NCRS; there may have been another, i’ve forgotten. maybe the one in which you will your land to them to use *wisely*? someone bought us an invite to that for a gift; we laughed. wish i coud recall the org’s name.

one of the late night comedy shows did a vincent price halloween sketch; dayum, it was funny. snl? mad? one of them.